Visitors from Great Outdoors Colorado going on a trip down the Arkansas with multiple member companies of the Arkansas River Outfitters Association. Photo by Luke Urbine.
August 15 has come and gone again—the unofficial, approximate end date for the summer recreation season in the valley. While this was of course a great summer for all forms of recreation in Chaffee County, its distinguishing factor was its normalcy.
Quick sidebar: for the avid boaters out there, due to Bureau of Reclamation reservoir water release activities in August, river levels will stay high longer than usual this year.
“There’s been a leveling-off, this year,” said Arkansas River Outfitters Association (AROA) Executive Director Bob Hamel. The year has been “strong” he said, but it’d be hard to match the rush of visitation and recreators that the COVID-19 pandemic brought along with it.
The COVID years spurred river recreation to an unprecedented degree, as metro-area residents sought to get into a “safer” out-of-doors. Tourism on the Arkansas River was at peak capacity for almost two years, to the point where river outfitters had to “turn [people] away because trips were full,” according to Hamel.
While this year visitation levels were still significantly higher than pre-pandemic levels, a number of people interviewed for this story in the recreation industry remarked on how much more manageable this year has been than the last few years.
In a relatively calmer year like 2023, proactivity is the name of the game. Since recreation organizations had a bit more room to breathe this summer, they put some of their extra energy towards managing growth in the years to come.
Volunteers with Chaffee Recreation Adopters worked with Chaffee County Fire Protection District and Chaffee Recreation Rangers to clean up 160 campsites in the Browns Creek Recreation Area, removing more than 2,000 pounds of ashes and trash on Monday, May 16, 2022.
Conservation Efforts
A number of recreation and conservation groups have been working hard for the past years to try and promote not just recreation, but conscious and safe recreation. That’s not just cleanup and rangers writing up citations for campers who leave behind too much trash or don’t use a fire pit—although that sort of thing is important.
Since 2021, volunteers have removed 25,000 lbs of trash from public areas in Chaffee, according to Envision Chaffee County’s (ECC) 2023 report, a significant amount of that being human and/or dog waste. But on the proactive side of that coin, groups have put together 25 new restrooms and five new dog waste stations. Progress!
In another example of proactivity, a group of trail conservation organizations such as Salida Mountain Trails and the Buena Vista Singletrack Coalition (BVSC), alongside the National Forest Foundation and ECC have gotten the ball rolling on what they call the Chaffee County Trails System and Conservation Plan (TSCP).
Volunteers gather to get set up for the day’s work. Photo courtesy of Salida Mountain Trails.
The TSCP is going to be a multi-staged process, said Jon Turbush, executive director of SMT. It will include short-term improvements such as hazard clearance or the maintenance of existing trail systems. But it will also involve considerable rerouting of trail systems and the construction of a 10 to 20-year adaptive management policy, which can be adapted on the fly to fit a specific issue that may come along down the road (or trail, as it were).
The question: “Five, 10 and 20 years down the road, what do we want this trail system to look like?”
This mindset would allow the county to address trails holistically, instead of by the “whack-a-mole” method of problem management Turbush said is currently in place.
The TSCP will one day be folded into the 2021 Chaffee County Outdoor Recreation Management Plan, which was put together to keep the outdoor recreation spaces in the county “fun, wild, clean, and going.”
Program Director of Envision Chaffee County, Kim Marquis said the plan’s goal is to “protect natural resources, experiences and the economic benefits of tourism.”
Lately, that’s been most clearly characterized by a broad shift toward designated camping.
Alan Robinson of Friends of Fourmile advocated in his presentation at August’s Recreation Task Force meeting that all Bureau of Land Management and National Forest Service camping should be specifically in designated sites as opposed to being in dispersed, less-overseen areas.
Designated camping areas allow land managers to control how land is used by placing signage and necessary infrastructure like restrooms and fire circles.
“It’s not that people purposely break rules,” said Marquis.
To address the lack of expertise by newcomers to the world of outdoor recreation—newcomers that should be encouraged to come to Chaffee and explore the wilderness—the Chaffee County Visitor’s Board put together programs such as the Adventure By Nature Pledge, which can reward visitors with discounts at local businesses and further educational content if they pledge to protect the natural landscape
To check out a three-minute video recap of ECC’s 2023 recreation report, click here.
Luke Prewitt, left, Brandt Jones, Abram Jones and Mike Orrill patrolled the river corridor this summer as Chaffee Recreation Rangers.
Safety Update
“Anyone who’s been to a trailhead or boat ramp probably noticed [the growth],” said Jeff Hammond, a river ranger with the Arkansas Headwater Recreation Area (AHRA).
But the growth does not necessarily determine how the AHRA treats safety. In short, whether there are 100,000 visitors or 10 in a summer, the AHRA rangers try to help boaters avoid accidents and catastrophes before they even need to be called in.
As experts of the river and its underwater hazards, rangers with AHRA know when certain parts of the Arkansas will be particularly dangerous, depending on streamflow rate and water levels. They send out spotters to these trouble areas so that they’re already there when a call needs to be placed, or a rescue to be performed.
AHRA rangers are, of course, quite competent in the unfortunate event a call for help is received. Hammond himself performed an incredibly cinematic midnight rescue of three stranded boaters in July, who ended up on the river’s bank below cliffs and had to be rescued in the middle of the night.
It’s just that they do what they can to make sure anyone who does fall in is properly prepared for the experience. Examples of this include the personal floatation device loaner system in Salida, or the mandatory third grade river safety classes in Salida Public Schools.
On the mountainside as well, safety organizations have done some impressive work this year. In the month of July alone, Search and Rescue (SAR) North performed 15 rescues, as many as all of 2023 up to June 30, said Buena Vista Trustee and SAR member Gina Lucrezi.
Each year, SAR performs somewhere in the realm of 50 to 60 rescue operations in conjunction with organizations like the Chaffee County Fire Department and Emergency Medical Services, said Lucrezi. The majority of these rescues are call-ins relating to missing people or injuries. But with a volunteer base of around 70 people, SAR North has been more than up to the challenge this year.
“[SAR] does so much great work, and it sometimes feels like it goes unnoticed,” said Lucrezi. If you see someone in a SAR red cap around town, said Lucrezi during a Buena Vista board of trustees meeting, “be sure to thank them.”
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